reg, howardjp - I'm just glad there are some of us 4-digit types still creeping (creaking by this point?) around here still. Nice to meet you!

...they allowed the on/off selection of this feature to persist. In every non-hybrid car I've driven which has this, it defaults back to ON after every new startup, which is super annoying. If they would just let the driver select their preference and then leave it alone, it wouldn't bother anyone... and we could get back to arguing about important things.

I will add that even if the setting persisted, on all those cars I've driven the auto stop/start quality ranges from "meh" to just flat out awful. Hybrids, on the other hand, can obviously nail a seamless transition since they're doing it all the time anyway.

I was somewhat oversimplifying the situation here for the civilians out there who haven't lived in MidTN forever. For those of us who've watched all this unfold there's a lot more nuance, obviously, but I'm not here to publish the Comprehensive History of Becoming an It-Town, so to speak.

So your answer about their HQ location is...quantum: It both SHOULD be south or east of town, closer to population growth and easier for folks there to get to, yet also SHOULD NOT be anywhere south (or east) but instead smack-dab downtown, to keep it as far the [heck] away as possible from I-65S past I-840, for example.

I do 100% agree with that complicated answer.

Setting aside the lack of remote work problem, which is internal to Oracle itself, Nashville has issues which IMO could make it unattractive to move to:

- It's already a tourist magnet, so any of the music or other "entertainment venues" are often swarmed with clueless out-of-town tourists and the inevitable roving gangs of drunken Woo-Girls.
- Housing prices in the city itself are outrageous, and not getting better. Recent reappraisals are going to end up driving people out of their now super-expensive homes.
- The schools in the city vary from "pretty good" through "just OK" to "yeah, no." A lot of it depends on where you live, which is unfortunate.
- The mass transit infrastructure consists of buses, but primarily only in the Nashville proper, and a single rail line that runs only to the east. There are a LOT of surrounding counties where folks who work in Nashville live, most of which don't have access to those.
- (We're not even going to discuss the 'Tesla Tunnel' nonsense.)
- Housing prices in those same surrounding counties can also be outrageous, sometimes even higher than Nashville itself.
- The schools in some surrounding counties are genuinely and consistently good...but you can map that directly to the housing prices. You get what you pay for.
- The road infrastructure leading to those surrounding counties is about to get worse with the introduction of the euphemistically named "Choice Lanes" (toll roads), because, you know, outsourcing lane availability to private corporations and reducing the number available to us plebs makes everything better, right?
- The rollback of even the most basic emissions testing will probably degrade air quality in the coming years. It used to be worse, it got better, probably headed back the wrong way now I suspect.

The TL;DR of all the above is: It's a genuine "It city" now, with all the problems that implies.

(Full disclosure, I've lived in the Nashville area for over 3 decades now, and I was even here for a bit before that while they were still blasting I-440.)

We're replicating about 1.6PB between two sites using "file storage appliances from a Round Rock, TX based company", and the remote side is 12U for a little less than 3PB capacity. Granted, that product is expensive however it's pretty bulletproof once it's rolled out, and even at our size we're considered "tiny" compared to some installations that use it. Not sure why a major government couldn't get their [ stuff ] together and user LITERALLY ANYTHING to create some kind of off-site backup for that comparatively small volume of data? Unless, of course, the reporting around it is completely wrong and it's 858PB (not TB), which would be headed towards "too much", or at least be "much more challenging to do."

The quote from the article sort of encapsulates the time dilemma :“AI doesn’t have to make us passive. But right now, that’s how people are using it”. People often accept answers from these things w/o further effort towards validating them, which will naturally be a faster process. Of course that's going to lead to worse learning outcomes for them, since they're just regurgitating what they've been told instead of forming original ideas from valid yet incomplete pieces of knowledge.

Unless people are required to validate LLM results with some other source, which they normally won't do since that kind of defeats the purpose of them, I don't think the results are going to change here.

Turns out, "putting in the work" has benefits after all. Who could have foreseen that....oh wait, everyone for the past few thousand years did. At least until a couple of years ago, that is....

As someone who was working in I.T. well before Y2K (note the 4-digit Slashdot ID) and who worked on actual code and system remediation projects for Y2K, I can assure you that it was NOT a technical scam. We had old billing systems (think: AOS/VS II hosted COBOL, other dusty old crap like that), along with untold Oracle back-ended applications, which were both critical for a multi-million dollar company's billing cycle yet also poorly written enough that they absolutely 100% would have produced incorrect output starting in 2000. All of that had to be gone through with a fine tooth comb and fixed, which we did, and as a result my own Y2K on-call was as boring as hell....precisely because we'd done all that work. Other companies had similar Ancient Horrors lurking on their data center floors, and all those had to be fixed or replaced too. Never doubt the need, or underestimate the work required to get it all done.

Now, all that being said, there WAS an actual Y2K scam, but it wasn't a technical one: Rather, "Y2K Remediation" budgets became the dumping ground for all the bad ideas, lost projects, failed acquisitions, questionable purchases, mistress payments, and other C-level executive idiotic decision making. No shareholder would question the need to fix the actual Y2K problems, especially given the overwrought news cycle around that messaging. As such, C-types took the opportunity to bury all their mistakes in that budget, never to be seen again. I saw it happen with my own eyes, but nobody outside really grasped what all they were doing.

THAT was the real scam of Y2K, not the actual technical issues that needed to be fixed.

The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club (Wimbledon Inc.) is utterly missing the point here. The point of Wimbledon was always the visual and social experience of it...the spectacle itself of competition on a ridiculous surface while under a ridiculous dress code. Think about the impractical all-white outfits, the impractical grass surfaces, the (apparently) impractical judges and the possibility of angry arguments with them, the (not at all) impractical strawberries & creme.

If their goal is "maximum accuracy" then why not dig up all that impractical grass and lay down some durable hard courts, get rid of those fussy white uniforms and let the athletes wear something they are more comfortable in while they're at it?

They are damaging their brand here for no good reason.

You are assuming here that us humans will actually attend both movies in equal numbers. I certainly won't, and I strongly suspect others won't as well. They can "save all the money" they want with this, all the way to bankruptcy as far as I am concerned.

They, and other streamers, are risking losing a generation of future consumers - college students - who are likely to get bumped off the service as a result of this. Is it a smart long term business plan by Disney to piss off an entire generation of future parents, who will then remember how they were treated and continue to think ill of their vast array of products going forward? By sticking to some boneheaded 18th century concept of a "household" as one physical building, they're barreling in this direction pretty fast. If you're (even partially) paying for a kid's college expenses, claiming them on taxes, or if they are legally residing at your home (and are even registered to vote there) then they should be allowed to be part of your "household". Period. Figure that out fast Disney, before you completely poison your well....

The other thing that makes switching difficult are platform lock-ins. Ex 1. you have a license to run product A as much as you want with your own on-site compute resources OR the maker of A's own cloud platform, but as soon as you want to use it in any other cloud provider other than A's, that license is no longer valid and you have to relicense / rebuy it again, at the highest possible rates.

Remember 60fps+ "soap-opera mode" on current TVs, which enraged filmmakers and made film-based content look unrealistic and hard to watch. Buddy, just wait for...

“precise pixel-level image analysis, to effectively sharpen objects and backgrounds that may appear blurry.”

... and ...

"fine-tunes brightness and contrast by analyzing variations in brightness where light enters the scene, creating images that look more three-dimensional."

Imagine all those carefully shot shallow depth-of-field shots suddenly turning into a Marvel-esqe flat cartoon landscape behind the main characters? Consider what a hallucinating AI could do to those backgrounds. All that, and your carefully lighted and color balanced images end up as bright and washed out as the perp in the lamplight during interrogation scenes?

Nobody wants this. Hopefully it can be disabled permanently.

I think your first point (layoffs) hits the nail right on the head.

Since we've all been witness for years to how Twitter was done...and now for months how it was undone...it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to assume that a group of reasonably talented developers could recreate its functionality completely independently. Their task would be made even easier if there was already a stable, global, and free platform for them to deploy it on at scale from day zero, along with a gigaton of high-quality data to test with.

Assuming the treatment works, which really does look pretty iffy at this point, do you or anyone else know if they plan to pre-screen recipients (trial or "paid") based on any kind of functional / severity metrics? I'd hate for this to end up as nothing but a huge money grab targeting rich WASP-y parents aiming to smooth some rough edges on their kids on the spectrum, as opposed to a treatment to help those who could legitimately need and benefit from it. Again, if (big "IF") it works. Based on their rosy financial projections it would seem to be more on the "money grab" end of the capitalism spectrum...

Very true. Rare earths are primarily "rare" because apparently they 1) are hard to find in concentrated amounts (as opposed to being physically scarce overall), 2) are a super-duper-pain-in-the-ass to extract and process out, physically and chemically and 3) the processing of them produces all kinds of extremely unpleasant byproducts including some radioactive ones. So the mining, extraction and processing of them tends to happen in areas where environmental controls are....more lax (*cough*China*cough*) because otherwise the price would reflect the actual difficulty of getting them without also ending up with three-eyed fish.